Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency

“One of the finest writers of the new non-fiction” (Harper’s Bazaar) explores the role of art in the tumultuous twenty-first century.

In the age of Trump and Brexit, every crisis is instantly overridden by the next. The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.

Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

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Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency Reviews

Diane S ?

A few years back I started reading and fell in love with essays. There is something so personal about these short glimpses into what or who authors chose to write. In these Laing gives us a glimpse in...

Roman Clodia

I don't think art has a duty to be beautiful or uplifting... it's concerned with resistance and repair.
Drawing on Eve Sedgwick's 'Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading', Laing's framing essay/in...

Fatma

2.5 starsI know what Olivia Laing is capable of—Lonely City was one of my favourite books of last year—and I don't think Funny Weather did justice either to her writing or to the subjects she was ...

Stewart Tame

Full disclosure: I won a free ARC of this book in a Goodreads giveaway. According to a quote from Harper’s Bazaar, Laing is “One of the finest writers of the new nonfiction.” I wasn't aware that...

Auderoy Lin

QUOTES:What I wanted most, apart from a different timeline, was a different kind of time frame, in which it might be possible both to feel and to think, to process the intense emotional impact of the ...

Glen

I won this book in a goodreads drawing.A collection of essays about art, artists, and what it's all for. Most of it is the usual stuff you'd expect to read, but there is a section on celebrities which...

Sarah

Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency is Olivia Laing's response to - and takes its title from her name for - the strange, unsettling political climate of the past few years since Trump's inauguration. I...

Eleanor

Funny Weather is one of those round-ups you get once an author has enough columns in various publications to their name; the second section is two years’ worth of short monthly pieces for Frieze mag...

Brittany ?

I just won this book from a Goodreads giveaway, and will update the review and rating when I finish reading the book. :)...

Victoria Sadler

Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City remains one of the most affecting non-fiction books I have read. Olivia is a formidable essayist and art critic and she combined both these skills to craft a tender in...

About Olivia Laing

Olivia Laing is a writer and critic. Her first book, To the River (2011) is the story of a midsummer journey down the river Virginia Woolf drowned in. It was a book of the year in the Evening Standard, Independent and Financial Times and was shortlisted for the 2012 Ondaatje Prize and the Dolman Travel Book of the Year.